I love the color orange. Those of you who know me personally know this is totally true. I wear orange tennis shoes, hats, shirts, and socks. And buy just about anything if it comes in the color orange. So why is my car green? I guess that’s a story for another day.
Orange is just the perfect color for anything when you want to stand out. And I like that. And since Spiffy Press is all about standing out and doing things differently, it’s no wonder I use orange a lot. When I first thought of my Text Lingo cards, of course they were going to be orange. Then I leveraged the idea for the Love cards, and they were orange too. My wife asked me if I was going to use any other colors. Why I wondered? J
Today I thought I’d do a quick search on “the color orange” and see what I get. Wow! There’s a lot of info out there on many facets of the color. Here are some tidbits that stood out to me. This is pretty long blog post so here’s a list of things you can scroll down to and skip the stuff you’re less interested in:
- A few things I learned about orange
- Cities with the word orange in the name
- Survey of people’s favorite color
- Origins of the word orange
A few things I learned about orange
- It’s the color that evokes a “hate it” or “love it” reaction. You know I love it.
- Orange makes people feel fun, flamboyant, vibrant, warm, energetic, enthusiastic and creative.
- Curiosity is a driving characteristic of orange, and with it comes exploration of new things. Cool, I like this.
- Orange is a power color. Check. I like that too.
- Orange is said to increase the craving for food. Makes sense, I love eating!
- Lady Luck’s color is orange. Remember this for your next trip to Vegas.
- There’s a project called The Color Orange bringing awareness to human rights violations in China and protesting the ban of the use of the color orange. They encourage people to use orange. I second that. Link is below if you’re interested in this kind of thing.
- If a change of any kind is needed in life, just burn an orange candle for seven nights. Hmmm … never heard of this before, have you?
I was a little surprised that my quick search didn’t use the word happy to describe orange and how it makes people feel. That’s why I like orange. It makes me feel all of the words mentioned above, but most of all, it just makes me happy.
Cities with the word orange in the name:
Survey of people’s favorite color
I took at survey on one site to see which color is most popular … of course; blue is everyone’s favorite. I don’t get it. Here are the results:
Origins of the word orange
The original word for orange first made its appearance in Sanskrit as naranga. Sanskrit was the ancient language of India, with roots that go back to the 4th millennium BCE. Naranga wasn’t used to describe the color; just the citrus fruit, which was native to northern India.
From there, the term became narang in Persian, a language spoken by the ancestors of modern-day Iranians. According to word researchers, the term finally entered common European usage when the Moors, (Arabs from Africa), settled in medieval Spain.
So what happened to the n at the beginning of the word? It’s believed that when the word came to English, the n was dropped when they did not use the original article which preceded it. As a result, the French une narange became, simply, orange.
Although it was used to describe the fruit, orange wasn’t used to describe color until the middle of the 16th century. Experts argue that because very few things in the natural world are orange, there was no need for the word. Instead, writers substituted other terms, such as gold or amber.
Here are my sources if you are interested to research color or orange: http://www.sensationalcolor.com/color-messages-meanings/color-meaning-symbolism-psychology/all-about-the-color-orange.html, http://crystal-cure.com/orange.html, http://www.thecolororange.net/uk/, http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/colorselection/p/orange.htm
